Re: ODOO 8 and ODOO 9 Themes - Licenses!

by

Mr James Alfa

- 12/19/2015 03:23:54

Fabien,

thank you for your response, and not wishing to hijack Andi's topic I think that we all need to stop giving our own personal impression on what Odoo SA is doing with their themes, and instead we need to hear it direct from them. Thus I think that we now need to all make a concerted request to them to answer the question, for once and for all in a way that is unequivocal and which cannot give any further cause for confusion.

Thus I would ask that all those interested in this question put the same question to Fabien:

Dear Fabien,

there seems to be a corrosive lack of clarity on the Odoo Apps/Themes store regarding the licensing state of Odoo SA's and others themes.

There appears no consistent licensing statement made for themes that Odoo SA has published, and there are confusing statement regarding copyrights for images within the themes (eg theme treehouse has the image declaration from Unsplash stating "you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash" whilst your theme store states "The images in this theme are copyrighted and can't be used outside of the odoo.com domain." ). Without greater clarity the careful will always assume that the more restrictive interpretation needs to be followed - which implies that themes bought from odoo can only be used on your Saas, and not on any customers own hosted implementations.

Furthermore this lack of clarity as to the licensing allowed for themes is starting to affect other publishers of themes on the Odoo app store. For example this theme (https://apps.openerp.com/apps/themes/8.0/material_backend_theme/) contains the following statement "Once you purchase a license for a theme, you can use it on as many sites as you like, but you're not allowed to distribute it!" which is clearly not allowed under AGPL or LGPL licensing.

There are many, many people standing on the sidelines at the moment looking on at the Odoo project and trying to work out if it is something that they can use in their businesses. The lack of clarity about licensing something as fundamental as website themes does not result in them asking more questions, like we are here, but actually fewer - they will simply walk away from a platform that they cannot get clarity on.

We need to have a definitive and final answer to the questions - are Odoo themes required to be released under AGPL/LGPL licenses, or can you use any license that you like?

many thanks for helping us with this,

James and others in the community.

James

Le 19/12/2015 08:02, James Fox a écrit :
> *Thus we need a clearly and unequivocal statement from Odoo SA as to
> whether theme modules are required to be licensed under AGPL/LGPL or if
> you can make up whatever license you like.*
I'm pretty sure that, for Odoo v8 and AGPL, all modules and themes must
be published under a compatible license.
If you have an access to the theme, like a demo or the current live
preview into the store, you must have access to the source code, thanks
to the AGPL and the network redistribution already mentioned.
Wordpress and Drupal are clear about that :
https://www.drupal.org/about/licensing#q7
And no, loading code into database doesn't allow to bypass the GPL. It's
still a derivative work (which need AGPL code to run).
--
Yaltik, libérez votre système informatique
Fabien BOURGEOIS
Tél : 06.52.81.69.84 / 04.58.14.04.75
Fax : 04.58.14.04.72
401 avenue de Lyon, 73000 CHAMBÉRY